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Ask The Corps: Jungle Terrain

As some of you may know, I worked on some of the terrain at BoLSCon last year and was overseer for one of the Narrative Track games. This year at BoLSCon one of the tables will be Beta Anphelion IV, which is also a beautiful terrain set sold by ForgeWorld (and seen above). Unfortunately there's no budget for the ForgeWorld piece, so I'll be making it by scratch.

One part of the board I'm not sure about is the swamp and jungle pieces. (I think the interpretation for the board is going to a little more Dagobah and a little less Jurassic Park.) I'm a little disappointed with the swamp and jungle above, since it just doesn't look "wet" enough for me. Plus since this will be a Narrative Track table it will be home to Apocalypse level games and probably be about 15' x 5' and setup temporarily on conference room tables.

So how do I cover a whole board with swamp and jungle (without actually making a huge board) and still have enough space for Apocalypse toys? If you've worked on any jungle or swamp pictures I'd love to see what you've done.

I don't have pics yet but I have made a ton of jungle terrain. You can use poker chips for the small bases, they are 40mm and cheap. For the foliage get a ton of aquarium plants from a cheap online retailer. You can hot glue some rocks down onto the base, then while that is still drying stick some plants in the cracks with more glue. After that sets you can add moss or flock.

For water features I recommend DAP clear weather sealant, unless you need something more durable in which case clear resin works well. The downside is that the clear resin is expensive and can be a pain to mix and pour, although the sealant takes a while too. The sealant will not run while the resin will. Another option is to get a sheet of clear textured plastic from TAP and paint the underside of it with watery colors.

Try doing the entire table as swamp/fen, alternating wet passages and matted grass/reeds. Then place bases of swampy trees across it. Rather than just move them out of the way, perhaps house rule it so vehicles can crush segments of trees smaller than them (perhaps also allow flamers to destroy them as well)? That would offer an interesting "shifting" amount of terrain on the battlefield.

Yeah, I'm discussing it with Bigred now. If we make the whole board difficult, then we can have select pieces of terrain count as clear and then just scatter jungle pieces around the table (which we don't know the exact size yet) and not worry if the jungle bits are in the right place or get put back in the right place, making it easier to play on.